It's not desperately unusual, this time of year, to find certain people banging on about Valentine's Day and its silly cards, especially when those people are unlikely in their current circumstances to receive very many of the things, especially when the phrase 'very many' is being used much as it would be in the sentence 'In 2006, Iran made very many neighbouring countries feel safe.'

But I tried, honest, to find a good thing to say about it, not to sound like the kind of mad old spite-fiend who jabbers angry things from the other side of tube lines at happy hand-holding couples; and yet, as so often these days, my hopeless romantic was taken behind the barn by my poisoned cynic and given a sound thrashing with a tarred rope.

It's not the cards. Well, it is the cards, a bit. Not just the fact that to buy them you have to go into one of those pink shops which shout at you like toothache and unaccountably survive by selling magnetic words to rearrange on people's fridges so they make up something witty, such as 'you are made of wee-wee' (and - just a thought - do they do one yet for the Koran? Just how much fun do you think you could have rearranging that?) And it's not just the vision of so many Hallmark writers having laboured through November to write couplets about couples which, when you read them, can cause you to stand there for actually quite some time, physically sagging a little and thinking somehow of the grim, grey, dusty winds which will howl forlorn over all our lands in the days following Armageddon, which might not have been the exact intention.

No, with me, the card problem is the rush. Twenty-three minutes? How rubbish is that? Just 23 minutes, at close of play on the 13th, to get something for her, to be handed over the next day, because I can be slightly disorganised and also because I don't know her actual address, because I've always had better things to do on my nights there - inveigle my way in, break things in the loo, talk about myself - than walk up and down her street counting numbers, like a bailiff.

But my main problem is the togetherness. Not that involving one other person - quite love that, actually - but involving the rest of the human race. I don't, much, like joining in. Not when it includes doing something that it seems absolutely everybody else is busy doing at the same time.

This has worked many times to the good. I have never had to dress in a latex goose costume just because I was asked to on a decreed day by the BBC, or by the guy in the office who always cuts out headlines involving a colleague's name, for a laugh like. I have never read The Da Vinci Code, hurrah! I have never, for Valentine's Day, inserted one of those personal adverts (don't they always strike you as horribly coy euphemisms for the sex act or, ugh, genitalia? Rocky needs Sludgebucket and the like, and I've done many many bad things in my life, but I have never nicknamed pieces of skin) which all run on the same page of the paper. The same day. How individual and unique can your love be?

On the other hand, I have not gone to concerts to hear bands I liked, because there would be lots of others going for the same reason - and, perhaps a little bit, because I wasn't the one on the stage. I have not got a mortgage because, hey, everyone else is doing it, how hard can it be? (Answer: now, actually, quite.) A couple of years ago I hit a bad moment of self-knowledge in the South Seas, trooping off a boat on to some paradise island, and there were Fijian lovelies waiting to drape garlands round our necks - all our necks, no matter who we were, just because we were all a pack coming off the same boat - and so I ducked past and stood clear, neck free of silly flowers.

Then it hit me, looking at the faint brown bemusement in the eyes of garland girl, that I wasn't being so much of a rugged individualist as a curmudgeonly old sock-pocket; and I went back and put on the garland, and have worn it proudly every day since (actually, that bit's not entirely true).

I think of the garland, sometimes, to try to become more human, or at least less likely to end up the kind of person who shouts at happy couples in tube stations and manages to make a hash of paradise. But it'll take more than that - even more, perhaps, than the love of a good woman - to get me to join in properly on Tuesday.